


A Time to Reap

by the_ink_stained_knight



Series: Captain Spy-Witch [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Overwatch (Video Game), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternative Universe - Overwatch Fusion, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America Big Bang 2018 | cabigbang, Crossover, Don't Have to Know Canon, Don't have to know Overwatch (video Game) canon, Flashbacks, Guns, Gunshot Wounds, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Multi, OT3, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Property Damage, Regret, Super Soldier Serum, Team Talon (Overwatch), Terrorism, Was It All Worth It?, Yet Another Super Soldier, cabb2018, don't have to know overwatch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-20 16:54:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 18,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16141496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_ink_stained_knight/pseuds/the_ink_stained_knight
Summary: After an attack on a S.H.I.E.L.D facility, Captain America discovers another failed attempt at the super soldier, the otherworldly assassin Reaper, who has brought together his own dark version of the Avengers, backed by the terrorist organization Talon. While fighting Reaper, Steve discovers that he knew the man, and while the Captain gained fame and accolades for his heroics, this failed experiment worked in the shadows during the time that Rogers spent frozen, doing the black ops that the Captain would have never accepted but needed doing. Now with Captain America back, Reaper wants the glory that he has, and meanwhile, Rogers has to grapple with the idea of yet another person broken in the search to duplicate the serum that made him who and what he is, and if the ends justify the costs.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Art by Krycek: https://krycek-asks.tumblr.com/
> 
> Beta read and edited by Raving_Liberal

“Keep up, Gramps.”

Sam Wilson rounded the corner of the woodland path at a brisk jog, clearing the treeline and entering the grassy field between the Upstate New York pseudo-forest and the Avengers headquarters.

“You know I lapped you seven times, right?” Steve Rogers, nonplussed by the exercise, spoke from a step and a half behind his friend.

“Yeah, but it was nine times yesterday. What, are you sleepy?”

Steve chuckled. “Heavy breakfast. Nat made pancakes.”

“And no one invited me? Rude.”

The pair made their way to the building, Sam’s bantering ceaseless even though he was thoroughly out of breath. The men continued through the double doors to the atrium, usually filled with those few agents who still worked there as S.H.I.E.L.D rebuilt itself. Today, one woman stood with a tablet and a file folder in her hands. Maria Hill gave them both a single arched eyebrow, looking them up and down.

“I'm not going to get to shower, am I?” Sam asked.

“Afraid not, Staff Sergeant.” She nodded to Steve. “Captain.”

“Agent Hill, what's going on?”

She handed the tablet to Sam, the paper file to Steve. Wilson barely hid his smirk, but there was something about a physical file that Steve liked better than the digital. It made you slow down and focus on each thing.

“There's been an incident.”

“That's new,” Sam quipped. Maria just gave him a look. “Sorry.”

She started walking to the elevator, and as if a spell had been broken, people started walking around the floor again. Steve didn't know how she did it, but figured it was one of the many ineffable things picked up under Nick Fury's apprenticeship.

“There's been an attack on a weapons facility in the Balkans.” Hill said.

“Why do you need us, rather than a S.H.I.E.L.D strike team?” Steve asked, opening his file. “I'm certain they can recover what was taken just fine.”

Hill sighed. “That's just it. Nothing was taken.”

Sam looked up from his tablet, having already skimmed the first few pages. “Then what?”

“The entire engineering team was assassinated.” Hill’s deadpan delivery belied the dire news.

Both Steve and Sam looked up from the files, blinking at Hill.

“Is there a reason you didn’t lead with that?” Sam asked.

Hill ignored him, but Steve didn’t let her off so easy. “Answer him. Why did you bury the lede here?”

“They’re S.H.I.E.L.D, but no one knew if they were loyalists or HYDRA.” Hill looked away, rubbing the back of her neck.

Sam grunted, but Steve didn’t look away from her, his blue eyes drilling away at her defenses. “I thought that was dealt with, Hill.”

“That’s kind of the point of double agents: they are really hard to root out,” said another voice from the door. Natasha walked into the room wearing a black t-shirt, matching tights, and Converse All-Stars. Her crimson hair, shoulder length and razor straight, sat tucked under a black baseball cap, the Captain America shield logo bright on it. Sam smirked at it, to which she winked. “The good ones are, anyway. Hey, flyboy.”

“Hey. Where’s my pancakes?”

“Getting cold.”

“Can we focus, please?” Hill said, annoyance crinkling the skin around her eyes. For all the things she learned from Fury, his poker face wasn’t one of them. “We have rooted out a lot of the HYDRA, but there is only so much, save for mind reading, we can do.” She finally met Steve’s eyes, her expression hardening. “We assumed that you wouldn’t be okay with mind reading.”

Steve sighed, breaking eye contact without saying another word.  
“So they may or may not be HYDRA agents, but either way we are assuming they were acting in good faith until anything comes up to prove otherwise,” Nat continued, taking a seat at Steve’s right, between him and Hill. “Which is why we are here.”

“Right.” Steve cleared his throat. “What were they working on?”

“That’s need to know,” Hill said, so fast it felt to Steve like it was more a reflex.

“And we need to know,” Sam said, squinting at her.

“We don’t feel you do.”

“We? We who?” Sam scoffed. “Come on Maria, you have to give us more than that.”

“And I have. Rest assured that, whatever they were working on, it was secured and moved days before the attack.” She tapped on the table, activating a digital display. She let her thumb rest there for a moment, then flicked an icon from the display to the center of the table.

A video player opened, holographically projected from the table. It displayed a security video, the beginning at timestamp 22:21:42, of a grey-scale lab, a half dozen people in white coats working at stations. Black smoke billows in from the left, coalescing into a tall figure in black, a skull mask hiding their face under a hood. They wield a short barreled shotgun in each hand. The scientists try to flee or hide, but the assassin is too quick. They drop them all, throwing their guns to the side when empty, drawing another pair of weapons. They scan the room, then step into the shadow of one of the workstations and vanish. It all takes less than two minutes.

“What the hell was that?” Sam asked. “We have to fight a ghost now?”

“That’s no ghost,” Natasha said quietly.

Steve looked at her, concern in his eyes. He knew her, and knew this look, when something from her past once again had reared its ugly head in the present. “You know this thing?”

“I know of him. He goes by Reaper. He’s a hired gun. He’ll work for anyone, do anything, if you can afford him. Said he can move unseen in the shadows, and he almost never leaves anyone alive. The only reason why we know he exists at all is because he never bothers to hide his involvement unless he is paid to do so,” she explained, pulling the hat off and setting it on Steve’s knee, running her hands through her hair and rubbing her forehead. “This isn’t good, guys.”

“I couldn’t tell.” Sam sighed. “How does he do that?”

“Could be tech, could be powers,” Natasha mused. “I can't believe I'm saying this, but hell, it could be magic.”

“No one knows for sure,” Maria said, tapping other icons and swiping them in Sam’s direction. The tablet in front of him dinged each time she did so, the files transfered to it. “That is all we know about him thus far, and we have people looking for more information as we speak.”

“This says he's been operating as far back as V-E Day, in the forties,” Sam said, looking at Steve, who visibly paled.

“Yeah, I always assumed that it was one of those assassin family things, legacy name passed on and all that,” Natasha said nonchalantly, though she knew what her partner was thinking.

“So what can we do?” Steve asked after clearing his throat.

“Though what they were working on is classified, we know what his probable next target is. We want to put you guys there so that if he comes, you’re ready for him.”

“And where is that?” Steve asked.


	2. Chapter 2

“You know, I’ve always wanted to come here. It’s so romantic,” Natasha said, strapping on her spider bite gauntlets while watching the Italian canals fly under them. With the innovations gained from S.H.I.E.L.D’s new partnership with Wakanda, their newest model Quinjets all had sonic weaponry and cloaking technology, thus allowing the group greater ease moving people around without detection. The jet was on autopilot while the team suited up. “Zip me up?”

Steve knew full well that the former gymnast was flexible enough to get the zipper, but it was one of the things she knew that ‘normal’ people did, in ‘normal’ relationships, so she asked, and he complied without a word, zipping up her suit. Lines of blue lit up all along the combat fibers, her gauntlets charging the rest of the suit, making it nearly bulletproof.

His suit was more or less the same as it had always been. Different fabrics and materials, small changes in belts, a little doodad here or there, mostly added by Tony, but really, it’s been what it’s always been for seventy-six years. The stars and stripes, on his body and his shield, those things haven’t changed, but the man who wears them, Steve was less certain.

He secured the strap underneath his helmet, picking up his shield and attaching it to his back. Natasha looked at him, her green eyes glimmering. This man shouldn’t exist. He was born literally a century ago this past July, spent most of that time in a block of ice, and had been beaten, battered, and assaulted in a manner no one should be able to withstand, but here, nevertheless, he stood. He was what they, the SSR that would become S.H.I.E.L.D, made him, though he had become his own being, his own thing. Not unlike how Natasha had been created, all for a world that didn’t really exist anymore.

“If you lovebirds are finished getting dressed, we can begin,” Sam Wilson’s voice said over their comms. While the Stark tech did a lot to cut out the wind, his voice still sounded muffled by it.

“You jealous, flyboy? You can join in if you’ll like, but you know I like older men,” Nat quipped.

“Y’all nasty.”

“Focus up everyone,” Steve said, cutting the banter off. Hitting a button on the side of the Quinjet, he lowered the access hatch, filling the compartment with whipping winds. While Nat sat at her work station, allowing the autopilot to do a lazy turn around the old city, he walked to the top of the ramp.

“Come back alive. That’s an order, Captain Rogers.” She smiled, but there was a weariness in her voice, as if the words themselves were tired, having been said far too many times.

“Yes, ma’am.” Steve gave a salute and smiled, finding some solace in the routine. He then turned, sprinting down the access ramp and leaping out of the jet.

This, the flying through the air with no parachute, no wings, nothing but himself and his shield to protect him, this was his favorite part of it. In the three quarters of a minute that he spent in freefall, nothing could bother him, nothing could even touch him.

He made himself slim into the wind and dove head first into the canal. The water smelled fetid, as the canals were used for sewage removal as much as they were for travel. He swam, looking out for the access pipe that would get him into the research facility.

This was a S.H.I.E.L.D building, so Steve could have just walked in through the front door, technically. That idea was floated for a moment, but many people notice when Captain America walks into a room, even in civilian attire. They’d rather avoid the attention if at all possible.

He located the pipe, swimming into it and the building at large. He found a grate between him and the rest of the water waste system inside the building. Planting his feet against the concrete of the wall, he yanked hard on the thin iron grate, snapping the rusted metal and allowing him access.

Almost out of air, Steve swam fast, breaching the water and climbing up onto the grating that surrounded the pool.

“Enjoy your swim, old man?” Sam said over the radio.

“Hey, be nice. Swimming is easy on the joints,” Nat replied.

“I don’t know why I work with either of you.”

“Because you can’t always hit things with a shield,” said a third voice, heavy with an Eastern European accent.

“Wanda?”

“ _Da._ ”

“Didn’t know you were read into this.”

“Yeah, well, this guy is weird, so you need someone weird.”

Steve frowned, but didn’t reply. While he didn’t think the young woman was weird, they had a target to focus on. He closed his eyes for a moment, bringing the schematics he read on the way over to his memory. Through the door, down the hall, left, right, left, that door leads to the outside courtyard. It was two in the morning local time, and there was minimal staff in the building.

He was told that the target was in a neighboring building across that courtyard. He counted to three to himself, and then moved. No one stood in the halls, and as he burst into the courtyard, he watched as Wanda dropped into the space with him.

She stood tall at five foot six inches, her brunette hair showing highlights of maroon in the overhead lights, scarlet light swirling around her hands, feet, and emanating from her eyes as she landed. She smiled, her lips painted dark, despite the seriousness of the mission; she never failed to allow her own style into her combat dress.

“Captain.”

“Wanda. Can you sense anything?”

She hummed, rolling her left wrist. A thin circle of red bounced out from her, then another coming back to her, like some sort of eldritch radar. Her eyes widened, then she looked to her right.

He didn’t need her to say anything. He just moved, grabbing her and pulling her close, putting his body and his shield between whatever the threat was and her.

The gunshot was loud, echoing off the buildings of Venice, both ancient and new, and Steve moved a centimeter when it hit and bounced off the shield.

“Unlock your legs,” Steve said between gritted teeth.

“What?”

“Do it, now.”

She complied, letting him drop the pair of them to a crouch, covering more of their bodies with his shield.

“Where are they?” Natasha asked, over the coms, her voice cold.

“I know where she is,” Wanda said, anger deepening her accent.

“Push me there,” Steve said quickly as another trio of shots rang off his shield.

“What?”

He grabbed her chin, making her look him in the eyes. “You know where the shooter is. Throw me there with your power.”

She looked up at Steve, then nodded tightly. Her pale green eyes filled with scarlet, and she made grasping motions with her hands. Steve felt the rings of red light grip his biceps tightly, and he nodded.

“On three.”

“ _Unu, doi, trei!_ ” she counted off in Romanian.

“One, two, three!” Steve said at the same time.

Wanda drew back her hands, then thrust them forward, the movement throwing Steve towards the shooter. The moment he felt her power let go of him, he twisted this body, taking the shield on one arm, letting that lead as he flew into a platform, embedding his shield into the bricks even older than he was.

The sound of a low machine whirring drew his attention up, to a tall and slight female form being lifted up on a line, pointing a long gun straight down at him. He just barely got the shield out of the wall in time to deflect the shot, opening his comm channel.

“Falcon, you have eyes on her?”

“I do, coming in.”

Sam had been in a holding pattern, flying around the border of Venice, moving at what would be breakneck speeds if not for the support of his flight suit. He came in hot, grabbing the assassin from the line, breaking it in the process, and carrying her off.

Steve couldn’t see what happened, just heard Sam’s grunting curse and watched as he dropped her. She turned in the air with the deftness of an acrobat and fired some sort of grappling hook through one of his wings and pulling him off kilter.

She swung on the line, hopping off it at a nearby building, the one where Steve and Wanda were supposed to be headed, too. Steve swore under his breath, backing up to the end of the platform.

“Wanda, I need a boost.”

He didn’t wait for her reply, just ran full bore down and off of the platform, leaping at the last moment. Scarlet surrounded him as he came to the climax of his arc, and threw him towards the building the female shooter had landed on, Wanda racing to meet him. Steve landed, rolling to spend the rest of his momentum, coming up and catching up to Wanda in a pair of strides. 

Putting the shield up, he used it to ram through the wall, Wanda a step behind him. 

“Nat, I need the cameras in here,” Steve said.

“Working on it.”

“What? I thought you were already in.”

“I was, or I thought I was, but apparently not. I noticed that the camera was on a loop. It was good, and if I am right, this person is too good to be caught by something like that. They wanted to be caught,” she said quickly, the sounds of keys clattering in the background.

“So they have a computer person, too?”

“Seems like.”

“Get me cameras, Nat.”

“Working on it.”

“She’s trying her best,” Wanda cut in.

“I know,” Steve replied.

“Stay on target, Captain. You know where the target is, hit it up. I’m sure you and Magic Lass can deal with it just fine.”

“Magic Lass? I told you I wanted to be called Scarlet—”

“Please, don’t make me hear that bad name again.”

“Oh, and Black Widow is so good.”

“I didn’t pick it.”

“Ladies? Focus,” Steve cut in, rounding the first corner. The hallway was wide enough for him and Wanda to run side by side, and was empty, the lights turning on as their motion sensors picked them up.

“I can multitask,” Natasha said, before swearing, the sound of her typing coming faster.

“Wait, there’s something—”

Wanda was cut off as something grabbed her leg, a black-clad hand erupting from the floor in a cloud of inky smoke, pulling her down and through the floor of the hallway.

“Wanda!” Steve screamed, diving for her outstretched hands, but not getting there in time.

“I have cameras. She’s in the basement. Watch your back,” Nat said, as Steve spun around, watching the figure from the video rise out of another cloud of smoke. The light flickered in the hallway, and he pulled out two short barreled shotguns, firing both as Steve got his shield up. The blasts, smelling like fire and sulfur, forced him back.

“Hello, Captain. I was wondering how long it was going to take to get your attention. I’m so very glad I finally have.” Reaper stood dressed in black, with an ivory-colored stylized skull mask under a hood. Red and black grenades lay strapped on his chest and waist, heavy boots stomping the ground as he walked forward, blasting in time with each step. His voice was deep, but modulated and inhuman. “It is good to meet you again, this time in my true form.”

“Again? I don’t know you, buddy.”

Sliding back with each blast, Steve waited for the moment, which came a second later, the heavy clattering of his spent and empty guns to the ground. Listening for the swish of Reaper’s coat as he reached for new guns, Steve exploded forward, ramming his shield into the man, throwing him to the ground.

Steve followed him down, rolling forward and getting to his feet before his enemy found his guns once more. He threw the shield, bouncing it off the wall to blunt some of the force, knocking Reaper’s left gun out of his hand before it bounced back to Steve's hand. The Captain followed the attack with a punch, only to fall through a cloud of black smoke, landing on the ground. Reaper laughed, striking Steve in the back of the head with the butt of one of his guns.

Pain exploded in Steve’s head, but it was more than pain, something deeper than pain. Steve Rogers knew pain and had dealt with far more than any one man’s fair share, but nothing like this. For the first time since he was turned into what he was now, Captain Steve Rogers felt weak.

Reaper laughed again, driving the metal of his boot into Steve’s gut. The pain of the attack itself wasn’t even that bad, but with it came this weakness, draining him of energy. Steve coughed, and blood splattered on the white tiles of the hallway. Reaper moved to kick him again, but a flash of black, blue, and red flew over him. Reaper was on the ground again.

Natasha drove a fist into the man’s chest, her spider bites shocking him, illicting a grunt of pain, but he didn’t go down like targets of those weapons usually did.

“Black Widow, too?” he grunted, throwing her up and off of him. “I have one like you, girl.”

“Ain’t no one like me,” she said, nodding.

Reaper noticed it just it time, turning to see Steve throw the shield, bouncing it off the wall again, this time into Natasha’s hand, where she slammed the edge of it into the back of Reaper’s head. He grunted in pain again, and exploded into black smoke, vanishing into the wall.

“Where’s Wanda?” Natasha asked.

“Downstairs? He pulled her down as he appeared. You go get her. I’m going after him.”

Natasha knew there was no arguing against something Steve wanted in the heat of battle, and was worried about her other partner besides. She nodded, pulling up a schematic of the building as she ran. Steve ran down the hall, taking the first left he could find, trying to follow Reaper.

He found him in a computer lab, jabbing a purple and black flash drive into one of the servers.

“It’s in, Sombra.”

Steve wound up to throw the shield, but as he did Reaper brought up one of his guns, firing at the same moment that he loosed the projectile. The buckshot changed the throw just enough, causing the shield to embed itself into another server, but not harming Reaper or knocking the drive out of the computer.

The lights on the server changed from blue to purple, and Reaper tilted his head as though he were listening to something.

“Good, fall back,” he said, before turning to Steve.

“It was nice seeing you again, Rogers. Let’s do this again sometime.”

Reaper gave him a wave of his hand before taking a step back, sliding into the wall.

“Sam, do you have eyes on him?” Steve yanked the shield out of the server as he ran past it, and the flash drive out as well.

“I do. Following now.”

Steve found a window to one of the adjoining rooms and, leading with the shield, he threw himself through it, rolling on the pavement outside and racing after Reaper. Above them both, Sam swooped down in an intercept pattern, but then swerved into a barrel roll up and away.

“What the hell?” Steve heard him call out, stowing his guns and trying to take manual control of his flight system. He pulled into another barrel roll, and then pulled up into a nearly completely vertical climb. “Someone is in my flight controls!”

Over the radio, a female voice laughed with true delight, speaking in a moderately heavy Mexican accent. “ _Sí_ , someone does. Fly, _parajito_ , fly away.”

Sam swore, and Steve watched him trigger something, dropping from his flight suit and falling. He pulled his parachute, and glided to safety and out of the fight.

“Aww, _eso no es divertido_. Oh well, I still have this _juguete_ to play with,” the voice said, and Sam’s flight rig did a loop, aiming downward, only to be hit with one of the small two-seater cars that were so popular in Europe, the vehicle aglow with scarlet light. The attack knocked the suit off target, but it quickly came in for another strike against Steve, still in pursuit of the preternaturally fast Reaper.

“ _Que rico_ ,” the voice giggled. “But you’re going to have to do better than that, _bonita bruja_.”

“Yeah?” Sam barked. “How about this?!”

Steve couldn’t see what he did, but the flight suit exploded, seemingly a self destruct feature. None of it mattered, though, as Reaper became more and more smoke, then with a leap, slid through the second floor wall of a small hotel and was gone.

“I guess we’re done for today, _mis nuevos amigos. ¡Adiós, vete a casa seguro!_ ”

A loud screech came over the radio, then it went dead.

“Nat? Sam? Wanda? Anyone, come in?”

No one responded, and Steve jogged down to a standstill. Wanda was close enough to have hurled that car into the flight suit to stop it from hitting him, and thus she was alive, and so, too, in all likelihood was Natasha.

The pair of them stepped out of the building’s shadow, and a moment later Sam joined them, dripping wet.

“What the hell was all of that about?” he exclaimed. “Who were those people? What is going on?”

“I don’t know, but Reaper acted like I knew him, or at least he knew me,” Steve replied.

“You’re Captain America,” Wanda drawled, a bit of disdain in her voice. She didn’t like spotlight. “Everybody knows you.”

“Not like that. Personally.” Steve shook his head.

“Regardless, it looks like he has friends,” Natasha said, sighing. “At least one of them is a master hacker, so we have to scrap what we have and air gap everything before the next run.”

“Next run?” Sam looked at her incredulously. “What next run?”

“This one is just for me and the Captain, actually. You two go rest up.”

Sam looked between the two of them, then to Wanda, but sighed. “Where’d you park the jet?”

Natasha smiled. “I’ll show you. We need to change into civvies before we go out on the town.”

Wanda gave her a look, biting her darkly-painted lips, but didn’t say anything, just following Sam as they all made their way back to the Quinjet, three of them changing their clothes. Wanda herself didn’t wear a special suit. She had refused any of the outfits Tony had made for her before his betrayal, and rejected anything from the man now.

Sam dropped them off forty-five minutes away in Milan, then flew the jet off, Wanda flying co-pilot, or at least, watching him. She wanted to know everything she could so she could remain useful, her words. Natasha didn’t say anything until they were out of sight.

“We need to do something about her, babe,” Natasha said.

“What do you mean?”

“Jealousy. It's not a good look.”

Steve signed. He didn't know how he got here. The young women had a word for it, polyamory, where you were in a romantic relationship with more than one person. He hadn't meant for it to happen.

He and Natasha had fallen for each other during the HYDRA crisis, and had been tight with each other since, even if what the tabloids had dubbed the “Civil War” saw them, at least for a time, on opposite sides. Steve could respect her having an opposing viewpoint at the time, and if he was honest with himself, he wasn't being completely rational at the time, besides.

His feelings for Wanda grew at the same time, during that momentary separation. Working with the younger woman, training her so that she became an Avenger, rather than just the weapon she was turned into, forged a deep bond between the two. He understood what it was like to be turned into something other than he was.

He had admitted the relationship to Natasha when they reunited, and she was a lot more accepting—by being accepting at all—than the Captain had expected. She hadn't really cared about what he had done with Wanda, or that he wanted to continue it, so long as it made him happy.

Wanda accepted the arrangement, as they lived in the same building and she could spend time with him when she wanted, when he wasn't away, but she didn't seem particularly happy about it exactly, at least not when he and Natasha spent time alone together without her.

The relationship between the two women themselves moved slower, but moved nevertheless. Even more than Steve could, Natasha comprehended the violations of those who would turn a person into a weapon, and what it meant to live with the grief of past actions that were, at least to a large part, not your fault.

The rest of the team, such as it was, didn't really care about what happened in their personal time, save for Sam, who constantly ribbed him about being a player when it was just the two of them.

“I don't know what to do about it, Nat,” Steve sighed, zipping up his brown leather jacket. His clothes, while well maintained, were definitely US Army surplus, down to the green logoless ballcap. Natasha also wore a leather jacket, but hers was bespoke, and left open to reveal her thin black blouse over overly-tight jeans. While the Milanese air was mildly chilly, the cold didn't faze the former Russian spy.

“We need to sit down and talk to her about it.”

“Sure, maybe after we stop the guy who can turn into a ghost and his motley crew.”

She snickered, but sighed when Steve gave her a confused look. “It's a band, heavy metal from the 80s.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, they're fun. 'Kickstart my Heart’, 'Girls Girls Girls’. You should check them out.”

“Uh huh.”

“Not spelled the way you're thinking, though. M-O-T-L-E-Y C-R-U-E with umlauts over the O and U.”

“Gotcha.”

She put her arm through the crook of Steve's, but not actually leaning any of the weight onto him that it would have looked like she was. They walked out of the industrial district and into the city proper.

“ _Ooh, yeah,_ ” Natasha sung quietly to herself. “ _Kickstart my heart, hope it never stops. Ooh, yeah…_ ”


	3. Chapter 3

Natasha pulled Steve into a small café, one of a hundred in the Italian city. They sat, and when a young acne-riddled man came for their order, she ran off a list of things in fluent Italian. He nodded, and then left them alone.

“That was a lot of words for coffee,” Steve muttered.

“I also told him I’d give him three hundred Euros if he didn’t seat anyone else near us.”

“Hmm, and how much is that American?”

“About three hundred sixty bucks.”

Steve made a noise. While he had a grasp on prices in the twenty-first century, part of him still balked at large expenditures. That much money would be a couple months’ wages, nearly $6400, when he was young. The young man brought the two coffees, espresso for Natasha, and a mug of Americano, or what as close to normal coffee as they served, for Steve. They both drank them black, and it was clear that Natasha was deliberately not looking at something.

“What’s up, Nat?”

“The apartment building across the way, see it?”

“Yup.”

The building was not new, but not ancient either, probably one of the buildings rebuilt after the heavy bombing the city took from during World War II. Milan wasn’t the only thing unmade and rebuilt because of the war, Steve mused.

“It used to be a lab,” Natasha said, bringing Steve back from his reverie. “Or rather, that building is built over where the underground lab was. I have intel that there might be information about Reaper there. Progress notes and the like.”

“Why would it still be there?”

“Seems like whoever was in there had to get out of town quickly, probably under threat of bombings. Maybe they moved the things out later, but most secret evil organizations aren’t super big on going back to pick things up when they are run out of town.”

Again, Steve made a sound, watching the apartment building as he sipped his coffee. “I’m guessing we’re going in?”

“Well, I am. You can stay here if you are ready for your nap, old man.”

She smirked, downing her smaller drink and placing a bunch of bills under her mug, far more than the two drinks were worth. Steve drank his coffee in a long pull, the warm liquid pushing away the chill.

The pair rose, and they entered the apartment building across the street. The locks on the doors had nothing on the skills of the former Russian spy, and in a moment, they were inside, walking down the cramped hallway and down the stairway to an even more cramped basement. Between the water heater, garbage disposal area, and various storage items, under a rusted out moped was trap door, locked with a small padlock. While the door itself was unmarked, a small symbol was stamped into the metal, a stylized T going to through a shield.

“This looks ‘evil organization’ to me,” Natasha quipped. “Help me move this thing?”

She hadn’t needed to ask, but he needed her to, so she did so. He looked around, finding a piece of rebar discarded under a radiator and using it to break the loop of the lock.

She thanked him, pulling the trap door up and turning on a flashlight on her right cuff, finding a narrow iron ladder. “Age before beauty?” she said, looking up at him.

Steve rolled his eyes and looked down, electing to ignore the ladder all together and just drop down to the ground fifteen feet down. Landing in a crouch, he brought the rebar up as a weapon. Natasha slid down the ladder, not using the rungs. She pulled a small pistol from behind her back and eyed Steve.

“Don’t you wish you’d taken Tony up on that retractable shield, huh?”

“What’s the point of a symbol if you can’t see it?” he said before even thinking about the words. That was the reply he had given to Stark when he first told him about the idea before the fight happened, and even then the words felt sour in his mouth. He was more than a symbol, more than an idea, at least he wanted to be more than that, but it was what others needed him to be.

She gave him a noncommittal noise, scouting ahead of him. He didn’t like it, but she knew what to look for, he didn’t. The hallway was made of tile that was long on its way to fading to yellow from white. Detritus lay everywhere, fallen backpacks and papers. Picking up one of the papers, Steve found it was written in Italian.

“Nat, can you read this?”

She stopped, looking back at him and then at the sheet of paper. “Can I? Yes, I speak a ton of languages, but will I, right now, in the hallway of this secret evil lab?” She didn’t answer her own question, just hooked one of her fine eyebrows at him. Steve sighed, accepting her reasoning, and shoved the sheet into a pocket.

She pressed herself up against a wall on one side of a pair of double doors. Covering her light with a hand, she peered inside the room, then rolled herself off the wall and into the room, Steve right behind.

The pair found themselves in an examination room, a stainless steel chair taking up the majority of the floor space. Natasha all but ignored it, looking around the room for papers and files, but Steve couldn’t look away from it.

A dozen tubes fed into the back of the chair, and when Steve squatted down, he found two rounded metal parts that, when deployed, would wrap the chair in a cocoon of metal. On one of them was painted the same logo from the lock, a stylized T through a shield. Steve shivered, moving back until he struck a wall, hands reaching out to hold at whatever was behind him. In that moment, what he had assumed was wall depressed, and lights flicked on.

“Shit,” Natasha said, looking at him as a klaxon began to sound.

_Attivazione senza codice corretto, inserire il codice corretto in dieci secondi._

“What does that mean?” Steve called over the noise.

“That it’s time to get the hell out of here! Grab a box of files and run!” She stuffed everything she had in her hands into the box before her and lifted it, running out of room, Steve taking another and following behind. The voice on the alarm counted down, and then there was the sound of explosions. The entire structure shook, cracks forming all around them. The hallway before them crumbled, and Steve barely had enough time to pull Natasha out of harm’s way and into a side room. This one was a more general use room, and had a small window at what would be the bottom of the exterior face of the building’s wall.

“Can you fit?” She asked him, the stress not reaching her voice. It never did.

“I will have to. Go, I’ll boost you up.” He cupped his hands, holding her up as she broke the glass and shimmed her way through. He passed her the box she carried, then his, followed by the blast of another large explosion.

“Steve!”

He grabbed the window ledge and pulled himself up, rolling out of the way as the building collapsed into the basement. He came up on his knees, watching the dust rise. He moved towards the rumble pile.

“Steve! We have to get out of here,” Natasha said, grabbing his arm and pulling him fruitlessly away.

“There could be people in there!”

“And emergency services are on their way already, as are the police. We can’t do anything if we are arrested for blowing up a residential building on foreign soil! We have to leave!”

Steve didn’t say anything. The sound of sirens grew louder and he relented, picking up his box and running behind Natasha before the emergency vehicles converged on the site. This is why she was so important to the mission, her level and cool head in the face of the horrible, but Steve couldn’t help but feel cold inside, leaving God only knew how many innocent souls at risk in his wake.

They found an alley they could catch their breath in, Natasha using the time to pull a small transponder from her belt and activate it. Within half an hour, Sam flew to the Milan, picking them up and returning them home. Steve didn’t look at Natasha for most of the flight, and when he did, he found her dozing softly. _Wherever one could catch some z’s is a good place to_ , she would say, to explain why she was able to sleep almost anywhere at any time.

Instead of giving it to his fatigue, Steve pulled out one of the tablet computers that lay in nooks all over the space. Tech wiz he was not, but he knew how to Google. There were no serious injuries in the collapse of the apartment building, though there were many minor ones, as most people hadn’t come back from their evening activities or work at that time. Slim luck, that, but it was the best that Steve could ask for. He had enough blood on his hands.


	4. Chapter 4

It took the guys at S.H.I.E.L.D a day to translate the dozens of documents Steve and Natasha had recovered in Italy. During that time, the team rested. The jet from Italy didn’t land for a few hours, though with the time difference, it was nearly the same time as when they entered Milan when they landed at the Avengers Headquarters.

Steve chose to sleep in Wanda’s room that night, though not a lot of sleeping took place. Instead he laid in her firmer-than-he-would-have-liked mattress, holding the much younger woman.

She didn’t need to be asked to help him, and he needed her to not ask, but to know what to do in that moment, so she did. Tracing her fingers along the skin of his inner forearm, she sent gentle pulses of scarlet light into him. Wanda didn’t so much affect the workings of his mind as she did tempered the pain. When they described it to Natasha, she quipped that it was like Icy Hot for the mind, and then the two women had to explain what Icy Hot was.

Wanda didn’t last long, however, as she was exhausted by the early overextension of her powers, and soon fell asleep in his arms. This, too, had a calming effect on the Captain. For a long time, he just watched her, breathing softly, mumbling in Romanian about whatever dream had taken her away from the waking world that night. Thankfully, at least, it wasn’t a nightmare, as those tended to end with her waking that wing of the complex with her unconcious use of her powers to deal with whatever monsters her dreaming mind had conjured that night. Steve was almost certain that he, Wanda, and Natasha were the only people left on that floor of that wing, the rest of the staff relocating to the other, quieter, floors.

When they woke in the morning, the sun was just barely over the horizon, and the smell of bacon filled the air. Wanda and Steve both rolled out of bed, him in a plain white tee and sweatpants, her in a men’s band t-shirt, too big for her frame and falling to just above her knee, but naught else.

In the communal room, where sat the kitchenette, stood a fully dressed Sam, and Natasha, also dressed.

“Good morning love birds,” Sam said, smirk plastered on his face. “Breakfast will be up soon. Well, breakfast for me and the ladies. For you, Mister Rogers, I will have a bowl of nice oatmeal with some rehydrated prunes.”

“Ha, ha, ha,” Steve said, sitting on the stool between Wanda and Natasha.

Despite his joke, Sam had scrambled eggs, paired with a side of bacon, toast, and coffee for everyone.

“What do you think that place that you guys found was?” Wanda asked, picking at her food. All this time in the states, she still wasn’t used to the heavy breakfasts that were commonplace here.

“I don’t know, but I have a bad feeling about it,” Steve said, all but wolfing down his food to keep up with his faster metabolism. Eventually Natasha passed him her bacon, which she didn’t partake of, and likewise Wanda also gave Steve the food she wasn’t going to finish.

“Why is that?” Sam asked, getting the two last pieces of toast on to Steve’s plate.

“Bad memories.” He didn’t say more than that, and the meal went on in silence. As Steve swiped up the last of the ketchup he put on his eggs—to Sam’s chagrin—with the last half piece of toast, a bell rang and Mara Hill’s stoic face appeared on a far wall.

“If you are done with breakfast, please meet me in the briefing room, thank you.”

Steve and Wanda retreated to their private rooms, changing into casual clothes before joining Sam and Natasha to go down to the meet with Hill. Natasha slid around the back of the elevator to Wanda’s side, taking hold of one of her hands and chatting with her quietly in Romanian. Steve didn’t understand a word of it, but he couldn’t help but think it was about him.

Three tablets and a file folder lie on the small table in the room, Hill standing next to a large display board, hands behind her back. There were extra seats in the room, and it was in that moment that Steve realized that he’d never really seen her ever sit down other than when she was inside a vehicle.

“Please take a seat. There is a lot to go over and not much time.” The group complied, and Hill turned on the display. On it spun the T and shield logo that marked the lab they had found. “This is the symbol for Talon, a covert terrorism group run out of Europe.”

“Covert? How exactly does terrorism work, if you don’t know the source of the attacks?” Sam asked.

“By funding other groups and sowing chaos all over the world,” Hill replied, clicking to a few videos of different events, each captioned with where they happened. An assault on a number of facilities in Oslo, Norway. Another building bombed in Rome, a group of heavily armored red-masked men storming a memorial museum in California, stealing a relic of an old super-powered villain “Doomfist,” and the assassination of a religious figure in the streets of London. A ruin in Ilios, Greece was sacked, and an assassination attempt on the CEO of a technology company in St. Petersburg, Russia. They were behind a failed attack on a train in Texas a few years before, and countless other events.

“How have we not noticed them by now?” Wanda asked, her accent heavier than usual. That always happened when she was restraining her anger.

“We’ve been busy. You know, with the whole being infiltrated by secret Nazis, then having to work to get an international accords together that was summarily ignored while you people fought each other. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if HYDRA had a hand in obfuscating Talon’s work.” Hill sighed. “The why of it doesn’t matter. We’re on the case now.”

“Agreed. Do we know what they were doing in that lab?” Steve asked.

“We have an idea about it, yes.”

The team sat in silence that felt more like an hour than the few seconds it really was. “Would you like to share with the class?” Sam finally said.

“Not at the moment, no, you don’t really need to know.”

“ _Trebuie să mă bați joc de rahatul ăsta spion!_ ” Wanda spat, her eyes faintly glowing with her anger. “What is the point of this, if they won’t tell us what we are facing? Do you know what happens when you fight things without full information, Hill? You die.”

Hill didn’t react to the younger woman’s outburst. “Would one of you like to get her under control?”

Natasha slid closer to her, putting a hand on hers. “She isn’t wrong, Maria. We need more intel.”

Rolling her eyes, Hill continued. “I disagree. I don’t have time for this, and thus, neither do you. Here’s what we know about Talon’s philosophy, such as it is. They believe in some strange extreme of social Darwinism, where conflict and war would separate the wheat from from the chaff. Those who survive the wars they would start would, supposedly, be the paragons of the human condition and be all the stronger for it.”

Natasha sighed. “I’ve heard such ideas before.”

“Quite. We don’t know much about their leadership at the moment, save for one, who is out of Africa. Nigeria to be exact.” Hill tapped her tablet, which brought up a picture of a black man in his forties, dressed in what had to be a bespoke suit, as it was tailored around what looked to be a cybernetic arm. “This is Akande Ogundimu, also known as the third Doomfist.” The picture changed from the gentlemanly suit–wearing Ogundimu to one bare chested, the just slightly larger than normal arm replaced with one that would be comically large if not for the fact that the video Hill played showed him stopping an armored tank with a single punch from that arm. “It is believed that he is the main thrust of this philosophy. He was jailed in Nigeria, but was broken out, presumably by his Talon fighters.”

“Again, how did we not know any of this?” Wanda asked, incredulous.

“Yeah, I’m wondering that myself,” Steve muttered, taking a hard look at Hill, who didn’t waver in the slightest.

“It was on S.H.I.E.L.D’s radar, to be sure, but it wasn't something you needed know about. You had your own missions to handle and S.H.I.E.L.D, such as it was at the time, sent agents to help defend the jail and prevent this.”

“Were they on the up and up?” asked Sam, an eyebrow cocked.

“Apparently not,” Maria said, an edge on her voice, “as they didn’t end up helping with anything. It’s possible that the HYDRA agents helped Ogundimu escape, but none of that matters now. We are where we are.”

“So are you going to tell us what they were doing in that lab, even a vague idea of it?” Natasha asked, rubbing at her face in exasperation.

“That’s not of consequence, either.”

The group just looked at Maria Hill with various levels of incredulity. Natasha was the least annoyed, taking the idea that she didn’t need to know something for her mission as fact and filing it away. Sam accepted it as a reality of operating in a military-esque system. Wanda was infuriated, Steve could tell, but was focused at the moment on trying to not let her emotions override her control on her potent abilities.

Steve, however, was inflamed. This was classic S.H.I.E.L.D, and something that he thought they had passed, or he’d have never agreed to come back to work with them, had he known this was going to happen again. That said, however, he knew that he had a snowball’s chance in Hell to get any information out of Hill that she didn’t want to give.

“Fine,” Steve said with a finality that prohibited any more discussion on the topic.

“Good. You guys will have about another day of rest while the team goes through all the footage and after action reports you gave us, but start packing. The moment we knew this was Talon, we alerted our Wakandan friends about it, and they would like you to visit them, as they think they know where they are attacking next. Understood?”

The group nodded, and Hill dismissed them. Once she left the room, Wanda turned to Steve.

“We can’t do this without knowing what we’re up against,” she muttered, not sure if they were outside of the agent’s earshot yet.

“I agree,” Steve said.

The three looked at him with surprise.

“Didn’t much seem like it to me, or maybe I missed something,” Sam said, cocking an eyebrow.

“She wasn’t going to give it up, but there are other places one can get information.”


	5. Chapter 5

_A waitress brought the group a pair of drinks each, a pint of beer and a shot of whiskey. The beer was British, but the whiskey was American. Ten people, nine men and one woman, sat around a table not meant to cater to so many. They sat with arms and legs touching each other, almost none of them looking at each other._

_The woman cleared her throat. Picking up her beer, she spoke in a clipped British accent. “We lost a good man today, even though we won a war.” She opened her mouth, but stopped, barely holding back a sob._

_”To Captain Rogers,” said a man with a three piece suit, pencil-thin mustache, and a perpetual slight smirk._

_”To Captain America,” said another man, this one with a bowler hat and red handlebar mustache._

_The group gave a sorrowful cheer and downed their beers. Each of the group—Agent Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and the members of the Howling Commandos—gave a memory or story of interacting with the man, downing their shot of whiskey once they were done. Peggy left first, quickly followed by Stark, leaving the Commandos alone. The youngest of the group, a Latino male in a ski cap and all black, despite the warming March evening, was the only one still with a shot of whiskey in front of him. He looked into the dark amber liquid._

_”What’s wrong, Reyes?” Dungan said, nodding to the liquor._

_”Ah, nothing Sarge. Captain Rogers was a great person. It’s terrible that he’s gone,” Reyes said, downing the shot._

_Dugan clapped the Specialist on the back, walking away. “_ Aunque no lo llamaría un hombre, _” Reyes muttered under his breath._

_A klaxon blared out from outside the bar, the blitz warning. Everyone knew what to do. The civilians made their ways to the shelters underground, all lights went out, and the Howling Commandos made their way to the anti-blitz guns stationed on nearby rooftops. Most of the men split off into pairs, a spotter and a gunner, but not Specialist Gabriel Reyes. Everyone had a nickname that had something to do with their skills, but his came from his work as a sniper out of California long before he made his way to the Commandos._

_“You made in place,_ Parca _?” came Dungan’s voice over the radio._

_“Ready.”_  
_“Light ‘em up boys!”_

_Everyone else opened up wide, filling the night air with lead. The German_ Blitzkrieg _followed suit, firing down on London. A moment later, the sounds of whistling sung through the air, then explosions. The only gun that had yet to fire was Reyes’, his position still dark._

_“_ No desperdicies, no quieras _,” he whispered to himself. “_ Waste not, want not _.” He followed the line of one of the German bombers. The bomber bay door opened, and only then did he pulled the trigger. Just as the bomb dropped from the plane, Reyes’ bullets hit it. It exploded, taking the plane with it, which careened into the Channel._

_Reyes did this two more times, then fired a barrage at the face of bomber that swung into his line of fire. It exploded, but the propeller struck the roof of the building where Reyes stood, causing it to collapse beneath him. Reyes screamed, blacking out as rumble fell onto him._

_Flashes, were all he could remember about what happened next. Dugan and the other Commandos yelling, digging him out of the collapsed building, calling for a medic. Pain, pain like he had never felt before, all consuming, as Dugan pressed his filthy hands and some cloth—only sometime later did he realize it was his own ski cap—trying to staunch the bleeding from his guts._

_“He’s losing too much blood. We won’t make it to the damn hospital!” someone said._

_“Damn it, isn’t there something you can do? Someone we can call? We’ve lost too much today already!” Reyes heard Dugan say. “Call Peggy, get her special people down here. We aren’t leaving him to die, damn it.”_

_Reyes faded out again, and when he open his eyes, he was in a gleaming white hospital room, a narrow-faced red-headed woman looking down at him. When she spoke, it was touched with an Irish accent._

_“Good evening, Mister Reyes. Worry not, you’re in my hands now.”_

_He faded again, eyes fluttering while he heard voices again._

_“You don’t know if it’s safe!” said the British accent of Peggy Carter._

_“I’ve done rigorous testing and permutations on the blood samples you provided from the lost Captain. If I do nothing, the man will die,” replied the Irish woman, her voice cold._

_“Doctor Erskine ran through seventy-six permutations of his serum before he felt it was correct, Doctor O’Deorain. How many have you done?”_

_O’Deorain scoffed, tapping what had to be long nails on metal. “Erskine was a hack who stumbled onto glory, blinded by the most base of moralities—”_

_“Doctor O’Deorain! How many times have you tested this?” Carter exclaimed._

_“Twenty-four. This is the twenty-fourth iteration.”_

_Reyes faded again. When he woke next, he was on fire. Every single centimeter of his body burned. He opened his mouth to scream, but he was encased in a tank of swirling liquids. The fluid shimmered, gold and violet, and flooded his mouth, bringing more and more fire. He could see the tall, thin woman standing five feet away from the wall of the chamber. She pulled a microphone to her mouth from the console._

_“Specialist Reyes, you are experiencing a metamorphosis at the cellular level, which I am sure is quite uncomfortable, but you will be healed, and made better still, for the ordeal. Stay strong, I will rebuild you.”_

_Reyes tried to scream again, but nothing came out. Pain turned into nothingness, a numbness that Reyes knew was the creeping wave of death. As he watched, his body seemed to turn black, as did his vision._


	6. Chapter 6

“Hello, Captain Rogers, Miss Romanov. What can I do for you today?”

Vision levitated in the middle of room primarily made of stainless steel and plexiglass screens, his legs folded underneath him, yellow shimmering cape moving in a wind that only existed for it. He moved his hands as if he were conducting an orchestra, and with each movement, one of the screens changed.

The rhyme or reason to the change eluded Steve, as did most things with this synthetic man, but he knew that Vision could be trusted, though he was a little odd.

“We need information, buddy,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice light. While Vision seemed to be nonplussed by Wanda’s choice to be with Steve and Natasha, rather than him, it still made Steve feel a little like a homewrecker. 

“I figured as much, but what about?”

“I need the translated data we found in the Talon facility.”

Vision’s movements stopped, and he let his legs relax, descending to the ground soundlessly. His face was pretty good at showing emotions, but those emotions never met his eyes. This time, his face conveyed displeasure.

“You know I can’t give that to you.”

“We know that Hill doesn’t want us to have that,” Nat replied, cocking her hip. “But if we are to fight something, we need to know what we are fighting. I don’t want to have another go of it like last time, Vision.”

Without moving, all of the screens changed to a single video feed, a compilation of the team’s recorders of the mission. “Yes, I saw what had happened. It was…” He paused, putting a finger to his maroon lips. “Interesting.”

“How so?” Natasha asked.

“The hacker who broke into your feeds, I believe I recognize her style. Her signature. Tell me, Miss Romanov, have you heard of a hacker named ‘Sombra’?”

“Yeah, Latinx, cyber mercenary, so good that some think she’s powered. That was her?”

The screen closest to the trio changed, fading to black, violet code scrolling faster than Steve could read across it. Once full, the screen flashed, and a purple stylized skull filled the space.

“I believe so. I… I have a memory.” He paused again, shaking his head as if to clear it before continuing. “It was back before, this.” He tapped the Mind Stone embedded in his skull. “When I was still J.A.R.V.I.S., I believe she tried to hack into Mister Stark’s systems. I blocked her out, and then tracked her down to somewhere in southern Mexico, probably Oaxaca, before she got away from me.”

“When was this?” Steve asked.

“A dozen years ago or so?”

Steve whistled.

“She’s a part of this other team. She’s supporting them online.”

Vision made a contemplative noise, levitating back into the air. The screens turned back on, their contents flashing faster than Steve could track. “Now that I am sure of her signature, I can see her work all over the internet. She’s subtle, very good to be sure, but also brazen, egotistical, and like all people of this type.” He sighed. The screens all reflected that same stylized skull. “She can’t help but sign her work.”

Steve looked around, but didn’t follow what he was seeing, but Natasha, on the other hand, clearly did. She swore.

“You’re kidding me. LumériCo, Volskaya, Helix Security, all Sombra?”

“That and more. Seems like nearly every high level data leak, other than yours, Miss Romanov, had her hand in it. She doesn’t seem to care what the job is. She’s taken down as many big corporations as she has doxxed innocent people. Sombra is dangerous.”

“Exactly, and we wouldn’t have known anything about her if we didn’t have the data. We can’t be blind like this Vision,” Steve said.

Vision didn’t reply for a while, then he pulled his legs back underneath him in the fashion he had when they had first arrived. “I cannot give you the information, Captain Rogers, I’m sorry.”

Natasha’s phone beeped loudly, but Steve ignored it, looking up at the robotic man with hard eyes. “Now, listen here Vision, we need that information. We came here because we thought that—”

“Hey, Steve…” Natasha cut in, looking up from her phone. Steve turned to her, his face incredulous that she would interrupt him in that moment.

“What?”

“Um, I have the files, from an unknown source. I’m sure I might be able to look into who sent it, if I had a week and a very powerful computer, maybe.” She looked up at Vision with her trademark deadpan stare. “Either way, I am sure I speak for both of us when I say that I understand your position and respect it, thank you.” She bounced on her heels, and took Steve’s hand, turning them around and leaving the room.

“He sent us the data?” Steve asked, unable to hide the surprise in his voice.

“I can neither confirm nor deny the source of the information,” Natasha said with an even tone, though the arch of one of her eyebrows revealed her mood. “All I know is that I know everything. Let’s get the band together, Steve.”

Inside of the hour, Sam and Wanda had joined Natasha and Steve in their suite. Nat had rigged up a computer display and opened the files up for the four to see.

“So, this is what we know. Soon after Steve was lost to the ice, London was hit by a _Blitzkrieg_ attack, which the storied Howling Commandos were on hand to tackle. Captain, do you recall a ‘Gabriel Reyes’?”

Steve blinked, looking at the picture of a stocky Latino male in a black ski cap. “Honestly, I couldn’t say if I met him or not. By the time I flew the _Valkyrie_ into the ocean, the team had grown beyond me, and Dum Dum was leading it. I had bigger fish to fry.”

“Yeah, Nazi red fish,” Sam piped up, causing Wanda to snort.

“Well, he was on the team. United States Army Specialist Gabriel Reyes, Mexican-American out of Los Angeles, nickname ‘ _Parca_ ’, Spanish for ‘Grim’, probably a reference to the Grim Reaper, on account on his skill as a sniper. During the attack, Reyes was wounded, and in their desperation, they turned to the fledgling SSR scientists, many of whom had been recruited from Axis or HYDRA sources. This doctor in question, one Moira O’Deorain, gave him something she had marked down as ‘Serum Twenty-Four’.”

Steve blanched. “A super soldier serum…”

“It would appear so,” Nat said, sighing. “But it didn’t work, at least not to the effect Doctor Erskine had intended with his.” On her tablet, Nat shifted files around, pulling up photo-scanned typewritten files in Italian, then their translated versions on a more modern word processor. “It’s almost, in fact, the opposite. Instead of being instilled with an increase of vitality, Reyes’ cells are always in a rapid cycle of decay and regeneration. His touch and just being too close to him can sap that vitality from others, rapidly draining them of their own life force, which he in turn feeds on, prolonging his life, if that is what this can be called.”

“ _Hristos, e oribil_ ,” Wanda swore.

“Agreed,” Nat replied. “Anyway, what we didn’t know, at the time, was that O’Deorain worked for another one of those extremist groups that seemed to be in vogue at the time, this one called Talon.”

She shifted the display again, bringing up the stylized ‘T’ logo they had found in the abandoned lab.

“That symbol,” Wanda said, her voice dripping with venom. “I know that symbol.”

The men in the room looked at her, but Natasha merely nodded. “Yes, we believed, at first, that Baron Wolfgang von Strucker was a leader in HYDRA, but it would appear that he was, in fact, a triple agent, infiltrating S.H.I.E.L.D. and HYDRA for Talon.”

“Yes, he used the power of the—” she looked to Natasha and sighed. “ _Cum spui ‘sceptrul lui Loki’ în engleză, dragostea mea?_ ”

“Loki’s Scepter, hun.”

“Yes, that. He used the power of Loki’s Scepter on me and Pietro, _Dumnezeu să-i odihnească sufletul_ , giving us our abilities. Are you saying the same people who made me like this, made that creature?”

Steve reached out to her and placed his hand over hers, lightly squeezing them. He noticed the slight red glow emanating from her eyes as she spoke about her dead brother. She took a deep breath, screwing her eyes shut, as Natasha continued to speak.

“Yes, it would appear they were behind this as well. It would seem, from what we could find about the group, that their goal is to ‘strengthen the human race through conflict’.”

Sam snorted. “Yeah that’s some peak bad guy crap, right there.”

“Yup. They want to start wars to cull the wheat from the chaff and other social Darwinism crap. It’s not okay,” Natasha concluded.

“Do we know where they are?” Steve asked.

“Intel says that their leader is headquartered in Numbani, Nigeria.”

“Then let’s go.”


	7. Chapter 7

Only through the grace of Natasha Romanov did Steve dress for October in Nigeria, as what was 65 degrees and cloudy in New York State was a humid 85 in Numbani, the rainy season having just tapering off.

Sam had left the Quinjet a quarter hour previous, he and his drone Redwing doing recon of the city. The images captured by the pair were fed into the computers Natasha controlled while Steve flew the jet. Wanda sat near the cockpit area, watching Steve’s easy control of the jet.

“I’ve got eyes on the building,” said Sam in their radios, these promised by Hill to be at least doubly as difficult to hack as the last. “Guards outside look like standard, but are packing heavy heat. Looks like M16s or something similar.”

“Understood. Any eyes on any targets?” Steve replied, blue eyes closed, keeping note of all the the information.

“No guys with giant arms or who look like ghosts in the outer rooms, but even these eyes can only see so far. What there are, however, are uniformed grunts in one of the western rooms, looks like some sort of ready room or something. I suggest coming in from the roof. I only see three guards, and go down from there.”

“Heard,” Steve said, his voice taking on the voice of command, the Captain America voice that Tony had once called ‘a mix between G.I. Joe and _Friday Night Lights_ ’, which then prompted Steve to add them both to his ‘need to watch’ list. Only one of them was worth watching. It was the voice that gave the game plan to defend New York from the Chitauri and defeat Ultron. It was the voice that put bullets in the guns of America’s best guys all over the European and Asian theaters. It was not _his_ voice. “Wanda, you’re with me. I go right, you go left, okay?”

“Yes,” she said, her eyes faintly glowing with the light of her powers.

“Nat, I need overwatch, and get me into those computers.”

“What computers?” Natasha raised one of her eyebrows, smirking.

Steve scowled. “You know there are computers in there. I want access to them.”

“Thanks, Bill Gates. Will do.”

Steve sighed. “Sam, cover our exit. Once get whatever there is to get, we are probably going to be coming out hot.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam replied, brevity born of a difficulty speaking at his current altitude. Steve considered this a godsend, as he didn’t know if he could deal with sass from another source in that moment.

“Ready?” Steve asked the room.

“ _Da_ ,” Wanda said, stepping down to the edge of the ramp with Steve. Natasha merely nodded, tapping some keys that activated the ramp. With the cloaking technology on, it was strange, walking out onto metal that he knew was there, but his eyes couldn’t tell was different from the sky and distant ground below.

“Let’s go,” he said, locking his shield on his left arm and jumping out of the plane. Behind him, Wanda clenched her fists, both glowing, and walked off the ramp, held aloft by her ability. She lowered herself a lot more slowly than Steve’s pure gravity, but hers was nearly silent.

He landed with a roll, throwing his shield as he came up. It bounced off an exhaust vent and into one of the guards, striking him on the side of the head. The guard, surprised by the grunt Steve uttered on landing and knocked back by the attack, fell off the edge of the roof.

From above, a blur dove down, spinning as metal wings snapped out. Sam caught the man by the foot, flying up to drop him hard on the roof, unconscious.

“Try not to kill anyone until at least the two minute mark, Steve. It looks bad for the statistics,” Natasha said, her voice wry.

Steve ignored her, catching his shield. Wanda landed with a step, touching one guard on the forehead, putting him into a deep sleep in an instant, and knocking the other’s gun up into his nose, dropping him as well. Steve finished the last of the guards, running up to him and landing a Superman punch squarely on the man’s right temple. He crumpled as Steve walked over him.

“Nat, computers.”

“This isn’t magic Steve, I don’t just wave my hands here and make it do the thing.”

“That is also not how magic works,” Wanda muttered.

“I’m working on it, loves of my life. Now hush.”

A moment later, the door beeped and the magnetic lock disengaged, opening less than an inch. Steve set his shield into the opening, prying the door open just enough so that he could move into the building, climbing down the stairs with Wanda a pair of steps behind and above him. Peeking through the glass in the first door he saw, Steve found the hallway clear and exited the staircase.

“Nat, do you have the floor plan? I’m looking for any kind of server farm or anything like that.”

“Server farm? Look at you, what did you Google computer words? Three floors down, but only by the ‘B’ staircase, on the other side of the building.” Natasha swore. “I’ve been found out, move quickly, it won’t be long until they—” An alarm began to go off, making all three swear. “—find out that door was breached.”

“Get gone,” he said, pulling up his shield as armed guards rounded the corner and began filling the air with noise and lead.

“What?!” Natasha and Sam said in near unison.

“Leave. You know the rendezvous point; go there. I don’t want you guys compromised, and there is less of a chance of that happening if you get gone now. Sam, get back to the jet and fly her out of here. Nat, you keep on the computers, keep their hacker off balance. Now.”

Nat swore, but didn’t resist. Most people don’t resist the Captain America voice. Bullets _pinged_ off the shield, and Steve looked at Wanda, eyebrow raised. She rolled her eyes and raised a hand, scarlet aglow, and pushed her hand away from her. Half a dozen voices grunted as they were shoved back and up into the upper corner of the wall, then slammed down onto the ground. Steve and Wanda left them in a pile.

A thrown shield knocked another guard out, embedding itself in the wall only to be grabbed out by Wanda’s scarlet light and launched again down the hall, bouncing off the walls as if it were a rubber ball.

Steve went shield first, running through a wall as if it were nothing but paper. A quick scan of the room he found himself in noted three guards, one of whom he threw his shield at, the other he flattened with a spinning kick. The last, Wanda disabled with a look, dropping him as he screamed at things only he could see.

“You know, you’re scary sometimes, right babe?”

Wanda grinned. “Good.”

A kick from Steve both broke the lock and opened the door, and found the other staircase labeled ‘B’ down the other side of the hallway. Racing to and through the door, the pair found themselves on the server farm floor, the whole of the room chilled to the point where Wanda could see her exhaled breath.

“Nat, I need to know which of these to plug into,” Steve said, hoping she was still in range.

“Server number 616 seems as good a one as any others,” Nat’s voice came into her ears before cutting off suddenly.

“The server room is off limits, _pendejos_. You will have to come back some other time.”

Gunfire erupted from down one of the lanes, a bullet grazing Steve as he brought the shield up to block it. He cried out, pushing the flash drive into Wanda’s hands. “Go! I got her.”

Wanda’s red-tinged green eyes widened for a moment of defiance, but she nodded and ran off. Steve turned towards the direction of the gunfire, which had stopped a second before. He had not been able to see the woman firing on them, something becoming all too common, so he stopped moving, closing his eyes and holding his breath.

His muscles weren’t the only thing that the serum and Vita-Rays enhanced, despite that being the only thing anyone really cared about. No, on top of the strength and physique, they also amplified his senses. Not in any superhuman way, like some others he knew had, but just enough that if someone weren’t careful, he could hear them over the constant whir of server cooling blades and hiss of air conditioning.

There, a half step to his left, a boot scraped against the ground. Steve spun, throwing the shield just as a five-and-a-half-foot tall brown skinned woman with half a head of black and violet hair appearing as if she had a personal cloaking device.

“ _Chinga!_ ” she said, flexing one metallic clawed hand and vanishing from sight, flickering as if drawn elsewhere. The shield hit nothing, embedding itself into the wall. Steve found the door and locked it, then retrieved the shield.

“Seems like she’s going to be gone for a while. How is it going?”

Wanda looked at him, eyes wide. “Listen, I’m just about as good at this stuff as you are, but it says that it’s seventy percent done whatever it’s doing. What’s our way out?”

Steve looked around, then pointed to their left.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“Afraid not.”

She swore in Romanian, then pulled the flash drive out of the server. “Let’s go?”

Steve nodded, affixing his shield to his arm and running full tilt to and then through a window. He free-fell for a moment, then slowed, engulfed in scarlet light. He came to a full stop three feet from the ground, turning right side up and landing on his feet. Wanda landed next to him, a sheen of sweat covering her pale skin.

“Why are you so heavy?” She said, voice strained with effort.

“I had a big breakfast.” Steve replied.

The pair ran down the crowded Numbani street, the crowds scattering. Wanda threw herself into Steve, as a basket full of fruit exploded where Steve’s head had just been.

“Sniper!” she cried out.

“I noticed, babe.” Steve looked around, pointing to a covered market place. The pair headed there, keeping low to not present a target for the shooter.

“It is nice to finally meet you, Mister Rogers,” said a heavily accented voice.

Steve turned, raising the shield as a reflex, just as a huge fist connected with it, throwing him back clear across the marketplace. He landed in a pile of woven blankets, dazed and looking up at a tall African man, his right arm replaced with an oversized metal one, presumably the Doomfist the files had talked about.

“Why does everyone have metal arms now?” Steve muttered to himself.

“I have him,” the man, said into an earpiece. “If you want him, get here post-haste.” Doomfist moved closer to Steve, sections of his right arm whirling as if charging up. He lifted his fist to strike, but it glowed scarlet as Wanda came around a bend, eyes fully glowing.

“Get away from my man, _tâmpit_ ,” she growled, pulling her clenched fists down and behind her. Doomfist flew back in the opposite direction, crashing through two of the pillars holding up the large tent over them. Wanda made her way to Steve, pulling him up. “Are you okay?”

“As well as I can be.” Steve looked down at his left arm, the bullet graze bleeding heavily, turning the blue of his costume into a sticky purple. “That hurts, but I’m fine.”

Wanda pursed her lips, looking at the wound and moving her fingers over the wound. Steve hissed as her abilities stitched his wound together at the cellular level. “This will stop the bleeding, but the wound is still there underneath the patch. Be careful.”

“Yes, do be careful.” Sombra appeared in a flash of violet light, directly behind Wanda. She wrapped a clawed gauntlet around Wanda’s throat, slapping a small machine onto it. It flashed with a violet skull’s head, and Wanda screamed. Her body tensed up, spasming as the scarlet light died in her eyes.

Sombra smiled at Steve, waving at him. “ _Adiós_ ,” she said, as she vanished just like she had before. Behind her, Doomfist ran in, leaping into the air as his fist came down. Steve rolled out of the way, stumbling as the ground shook from his impact.

Ogundimu twisted, his entire weight on his metal arm, sweeping Steve’s legs from under him. He stood, fist twisting back into its proper direction. “Come on, ‘The First Avenger’, are you the best they could send? S.H.I.E.L.D must be as lowly as the reports say.”

Steve rolled back, shield up in front of him, eyes hard. “What, this? I can do this all day.”

“Let’s.” Doomfist flew forward, propelled by rockets in the elbow of his right arm, connecting with the shield again. This time, Steve was ready for it, rolling with the punch and allowing Doomfist to continue his trajectory behind him. Steve turned, landing a punch on Doomfist’s side and a shield strike on the part of the metal arm that connected with his shoulder. Something cracked, but the arm didn’t give way. The arm twisted in a way that a regular arm couldn’t, grabbing the edge of the shield on the next strike, pulling it and Steve in an arch, slamming him into the ground.

Doomfist pulled back his fist, another hand clamped down onto the arm with the clank of metal against metal. “You should pick on someone with your own enhancements,” Bucky said, lifting Doomfist by the arm and throwing him away from Steve, who looked up at him dumbfounded.

“You just came come up with that?” Steve asked.

“Nah, I worked it out on the way over.” He nodded over to the jet that had materizled at the end of the market. Steve watchs as a man in all black loped out of the open bay and across the market, leaping up and clawing at Doomfist’s arm, leaving deep gouges. “His Highness and I have got this, Steve, no worries.” Bucky moved to Wanda, who had passed out from the shocking device during the fight. He plucked the machine from her skin, crushing it in his black metal hand, and nodded down to her.

“Buck, thank you.”

“Hey, no worries. Maybe call me next time you’re around. There’s this great bar in Wankada.”

“White Wolf!” called out T’Challa, as he was punched five feet back by a rocket-powered Doomfist.

“Right. I’ve got to go. Take your lady and get out of here. Say hi to Nat and Sam for me.” Bucky moved away, leaping into the air to meet Doomfist’s punch with one of his own. Steve shook the pain from his head, setting the shield onto his back and lifting the fallen Wanda, getting out of there as the Talon leader was distracted.


	8. Chapter 8

Wanda lay down across several seats of the Quinjet as they flew over the Atlantic Ocean. While she was mostly fine, the stunner had given her quite the headache, leaving her to mutter dark words in her native tongue.

“So, what did we get?” Sam said from the pilot’s chair.

“Working on it,” Nat replied, frustrated. “It would appear that this person might be just a little better at this than I am, but only a little.”

“Sure, Bill Gates,” Steve retorted, drawing a level look from the spy.

“If you want to take a crack at this, by all means.” She pushed to turnable work station towards Steve, who didn’t move. “No? Okay then. The blue light specials will be served promptly at five. Until then, take a seat.” She turned the computer back and resumed her typing. “Okay, I’m in, I think. Yes, here we are.”

Natasha booted up the holographic projector, displaying the files in the open air. The first was a list of names, none of which Steve recognized. With a series of hand motions, Natasha highlighted all the names and had them spread out, each with a small, postage stamp sized photo. Looking at the faces, he could remember that he had seen a few of them in S.H.I.E.L.D. facilities before, be they back at the Triskelion, on one of the various helicarriers, or even recently at Avengers HQ.

“I believe that these are a Talon agents within S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Natasha said, making another motion to highlight some of the names, which were in green. “And these folks seem to be Talon triple agents both within S.H.I.E.L.D. _and_ HYDRA, reporting on both.”

Sam whistled, having put the jet on to autopilot and turned his seat around to watch Natasha’s presentation. He pointed to one of the pictures. “Hey, I know her. She works in the German relations section of the European Union sector. She stood me up on a date once.”

Wanda snorted, and Natasha shook her head. “Probably was too busy being a secret terrorist pretending to be a Nazi who was pretending to be a diplomat.”

“Terrorist or not, the girl has great…” Sam looked at Steve. “What did you use to call them? Gams? Great gams.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Shut up Sam. Have you forwarded this to Hill?”

“Yes I have, but I haven’t gotten a reply yet.”

“It’s only been like two minutes since you decrypted it,” Wanda said.

“You don’t email much with Maria Hill. I have sent her cat emails at three in the morning and gotten a reply almost instantaneously. The woman is on her stuff.” Natasha grinned, but it faded quickly. “Or, at least she usually is.”

Wanda looked at Natasha, her face deadpan. “You send Maria Hill cat emails, but not your girlfriend. For shame, _dragostea mea_ , for shame.”

“Anyway,” Steve said, bringing attention back to the matter at hand. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes sir.” She minimized the list and pulled up the other file on the drive. It appeared to be a schematic of a tall building and the grounds around it, as well as the underground complex beneath it. “Wait, is that…”

“It can’t be…” Wanda blinked, sitting up from where she laid.

“Sam get on the horn with base, now.”

“Yup.” He tapped the headset he wore. “This is Quinjet seven-five-niner, calling AHQ, do you read?”

As Sam called into base, Steve squatted before the schematic of the Avengers Headquarters complex. Multiple red lines showed entry paths of attack. Symbols and encoded words covered the plans, indecipherable to Steve’s eyes.

“I thought you decrypted this.”

“I did. That is code that was inside the encoded message, in the plaintext itself. Compartmentalization, riddles within riddles. We can’t know what any of this means without context or someone who knows.”

“We don’t have time for that. Talon is attacking the base, and we don’t know how much of a headstart they have.”

“I’d say a pretty big one,” Sam chimed in. “No one is responding to my calls.”

Steve swore. “Cloak and go radio silent. They might have picked up your hails, but I don’t want them to see us coming as well. Natasha, if you were pulling this op and had however many men you needed, how would you proceed?”

Natasha looked at the schematic for a moment, turning it around. “This way,” she said, pointing to the bold red line at the top of the building. “Frankly, the same way we attacked Talon’s building. Drop in from the roof and go downward from there. Move down from above where they wouldn’t be thinking about defending so much from.” She looked up at Steve through her red hair. “We should do that as well.”

“That’s what I’m thinking, yes.” Without even noticing it himself, he had slipped into the Captain America voice. “Gather round, team.” As they did, Steve laid out the plan.


	9. Chapter 9

The Quinjet, perfectly invisible, banked to the western end of the Avengers HQ, dropping its cloak as it did. Within seconds, it was fired upon by a trio of less well-cloaked jets, using the old Stark Industries tech, rather than the Wakandan model. Regardless of the new model’s improved armor, the fire of three others brought it down, burning as it crashed into the Asgardian Bifrost knot pattern seemingly permanently branded into the lawn.

Using this as a distraction for the aerial defenses, Sam and Wanda flew down from higher in the sky, hidden in the sun. Sam carried Steve in a harness, shield bound to his chest, while Wanda carried herself and Natasha aloft, using her powers. As they landed, Wanda fell to her knees, her scarlet hair dark with sweat.

“No… no more heavy breakfasts,” she panted as she caught her breath. “Protein shakes and granola for all of you. New rule.”

“Sure babe,” Natasha said, offering Wanda her hand. She pulled Wanda up, smirking at her. “Right after we do this.”

Wanda rolled her eyes, wiping the sweat from face and began to mutter in Romanian, her eyes softly glowing scarlet. She exhaled a breath Steve hadn’t noticed she was holding, and nodded.

“Everyone ready?” she asked. Everyone nodded, and she brought her hands over her head, fingers bent like claws. The exhausts of the engines of the two closest jets flashed with scarlet light as Wanda grabbed at them with her power. Pulling her hands together and crying out, she brought them crashing into each other, then pushed out, sending the exploding wrecks into the third, which narrowly banked out of the way.

“ _Oh nu tu nu!_ ” Wanda growled, stepping to the edge of the roof and reaching out with both hands, grabbing onto empty air as brighter scarlet light engulfed the whole of the jet. Wanda screamed, dragging the jet down to crash into the lawn. She fell to her knees, releasing her power as the jet exploded, a thin stream of blood dripping from her left nostril.

Meanwhile, the Talon-by-way-of-fake-S.H.I.E.L.D.-and-HYDRA-agents noticed their aerial lightshow and began making their way to the roof of the building. Taking to the sky, now that the defensive jets had been crashed, Sam covered one end of the roof, while Natasha and Steve took the other.

For the couple’s part, they played it the way they always did, tag teaming any on comers, Steve occasionally tossing Nat the shield for a strike before bouncing it off the head of a mook in such a way that Steve could effortlessly catch it.

Sam opted for the more simple strategy of flying up and out about twenty-five feet and shooting whomever came to follow him. The team remained there for the few minutes it took Wanda to regather her strength, wipe the drying blood away from her face, and join in. The trio—sans Sam, who would remain in the air on overwatch and aerial support for the team—entered Avengers HQ.

The standard lights were off, leaving the spartan halls barely illuminated with emergency lighting. Steve stopped to check the body of the first S.H.I.E.L.D. guards he found. No pulse, and the wound pattern looked similar. 

“Shotgun,” Steve said.

“Reaper,” Natasha replied, swearing. “You ready for this?”

“Do I have a choice?” he said, his voice harsher than he had intended it to be.

“No,” Natasha sighed, pulling out her sidearm, a Glock nine millimeter. “But we will do it anyway, because who else will?”

“I think you can call Doctor Strange if you need some magic support.” Wanda interjected. “I could finally go see the MoMa, maybe get a soft pretzel.” The other two just looked at her, their faces flat. “Oh, so you two can make jokes, but I can’t,” she muttered, swearing in Romanian and putting a hand out in front of her. A soft pulse of scarlet light moved off in a wave from that hand, and she closed her eyes. “Three bad guys on the way, long guns and body armor.”

“Yup,” Steve said, counting to three, then rounding the corner, throwing his shield as he did. The disc of vibranium and steel flew true, striking the three and embedding itself in the wall.

“Steve!” Wanda called out, just as a door to a conference room opened and a huge man stepped through, grabbing Steve by the shoulders and throwing him bodily into the room. He landed on the conference table, which held for a moment before cracking, taking him to the ground.

Natasha ran forward, leaping into the air with a push off from the wall, landing on the large man’s back, her stinger cuffs sending a million volts of electricity into his neck. He cried out, but didn’t immediately fall, going to his knees. Hitting him again did it, though, with a solid boot to the temple made sure he stayed down.

“You taking a nap, old man?” she said, looking down at Steve and blowing a strand of red hair from her face.

He groaned, getting up slowly. “You know what, I don’t need this right now. I came out to enjoy kicking bad guy butts, and you’re harshing my fun.”

“Your buzz,” Wanda said, reaching out and pulling the shield from the wall with her abilities.

“Thank you, what?”

“The phrase is harshing your buzz, not your fun. Even I know that.”

Steve looked skyward. “I’m encircled, getting it from both sides. What did I do to–”

It all happened at once. Steve felt a vise-like grip on his ankle, that sick-to-his-core weakness and pain, and then found himself feeling a deeper sense of weakening, where he didn’t even truly feel as though he actually existed. Wanda and Natasha screamed, but Steve’s hearing had dulled, and a second later, before either of them could move, he was falling through the floor in a cloud of black smoke.

Steve dropped to the floor, shield clattering next to him. A heavy metal boot kicked it away, then the figure of Reaper squatted down in front of him. Steve looked past the death’s head mask, seeing dark pits of eyes without whites, and listened to his shallow, halting breathing.

“It’s so good for you to join us, Captain,” he said, his voice very rasping, more so than he noticed the first time.

“Yeah, no problem, Specialist.”

Reaper looked at the prone Captain for a beat, then started to laugh. “Is it that you remember me, Rogers, or did you get my files?”

“I don’t even know if we ever met.” Steve rolled to his back and kicked up, landing a punch into Reaper’s ribs, knocking him back, but not enough to not grab Steve before he reached the fallen shield. Reyes threw him to the other side of the room, moving in a stuttering quickness that was not at all normal, connecting an uppercut before Steve landed.

Steve could feel the vitality leech out of him from the blow, crying out and blood spraying on the stark grey walls.

“You don’t need that shield, right? You were the icon, the ‘First Avenger’ before the shield. You’re the weapon, right?” Reyes threw an elbow into Steve’s gut, dropping him to the ground. “You’re the best of the best of the best. Amusingly, as much as the Nazis and HYDRA wanted it, it turned out that you’re the _Übermensch_ , ain’t that right?” Reaper drove his knee up into Steve’s cheek, dropping him to the ground.

Steve gasped. Not even when fighting the brainwashed Bucky did he feel this kind of pain. This didn’t just hurt his body, but something about Reyes’ strikes hurt his soul as well. He exhaled, spitting out a glob of blood as he did.

“I’m what you wish you were, is that it?” Steve laughed, struggling to get up on all fours. “This is what you wanted, Reyes, to be someone looked up to?” He spat at the man’s feet, more blood than saliva. “You want the shield?”

“I deserve it!” Reyes roared, still moving preternaturally fast, but this time out of control with rage. “All the things I’ve done for America, all the shit I put myself through.” Reaper moved to put his gauntleted fist through Steve’s skull, but he knew this was coming, was egging him on. Steve cried out as he pushed himself, exploding forward like a runner from a starter’s block. He didn’t last upright for long, collapsing into a roll, but coming up with the shield as Reaper came around, a gun in each hand.

Gunfire rang out, Reyes emptying both clips onto the face of the shield. During the onslaught, Steve creeped back to the door of the room, taking the moment Reaper dropped his guns to pull new ones, rolling out of the door. Reaper screamed, following by walking as a humanoid cloud of black smoke through the wall.

Steve rounded a corner to find Wanda standing there, eyes fully scarlet. She stalked forward, letting Steve stumble behind her. As Reaper turned, she held out her hand, closing her fist tightly. Her scarlet light surrounded Reaper, who cried out. He collapsed into black smoke, but her power held that as well.

“I have him, Captain,” Wanda muttered through gritted teeth.

“Good, where is Natasha?”

“The Mexican hacker. Saw her, tracking her down.”

Steve leaned against the nearest wall, spitting up more blood. Was what he taunted Reyes with what all of this was about? He looked down at the shield, hanging limply off his left arm. How many people had their lives ruined or turned into monsters because of the serum that ran through his veins, trying to become what he was turned into? Banner, Red Skull, Bucky and all those other Winter Soldiers. Who knows how many others didn’t even survive the processes that got those few ‘successes’ to where they are. How many corpses lay on the road to replicating the super soldier serum?

Steve caught movement in the mirrored underside of his shield, a lithe and strangely blue form pulling up a long rifle. Lacking the strength to launch the shield in an attack, Steve threw himself into Wanda, shoving her into the wall and putting his left side forward and closing his eyes against the shot that came.

The sound was deafening, and taking the large caliber on the bottom lip of the shield without bracing himself caused Steve to spin, falling to the ground. At the same time, Wanda’s focus broke as she hit the wall, releasing Reaper from her hold.

The cloud of black smoke solidified on all fours, panting.

“ _Les renforts arrivent bientôt. Je suggère que nous retraitions,_ ” she said, her voice drained of all inflection. She looked down at the fallen Wanda and Steve. “ _Devrais-je les achevé?_ ”

Steve looked up at her. She stood at about five foot five, long black hair in a tail that reached down most of her body, poking out the back of a dark metal helmet, the visor pulled up to reveal a beautiful angular face. She wore armored clothing, but as seemed so typical of evil organizations, her armor showed off almost more skin than it covered. He could see that her body had the hue of the recently asphyxiated, and watching her, he hadn’t seen her draw more breath than she probably needed to speak.

“Yes, my dear, and go get your girlfriend. I’ll clear our way out.”

Steve groaned. It had been a while since he used it, but his French wasn’t that rusty. He reached up to the side of his mask, tapping his radio receiver. “Sam, do you copy,” he muttered, trusting Tony’s subvocal microphones would pick up his voice.

“Copy Cap.”

“You got my twenty?”

“Copy that, moving now”

His ears rang with the sound of the gunfire, his body ached from the beating Reyes rained down on him, and this man was probably going to kill dozens of other people on their way out, not to mention God only knows what they did in the building before they got there. He had to do something, even if every cell in his body wanted to give up. No one else could.

Reyes turned his back on them, black smoke billowing out of him as he sunk into the floor. Steve screamed, launching himself off the ground and trying to tackle Reyes. He didn’t even react, passing through him and catching the woman instead. Grabbing her and unable to change his trajectory, he carried them both through the window at the end of the hall, free falling towards the ground five stories down.

Steve let go of the woman just as Sam rounded from the west, catching Steve with one hand as the other carried an automatic pistol, trained on the woman who had, in the intervening five seconds, righted herself in the air and fired some sort of grappling hook up to the broken window and was slowly lifting herself up to it.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Steve exclaimed.

“I really don’t like her,” Sam added.

Steve looked up to the window, then back down to the three SVUs currently depositing S.H.I.E.L.D. personnel onto the Headquarters lawn. “Sam, I need you to get into the building and help Wanda with the assassin.”

“Where do you want me to put you?”

“Get as low as you can safely drop me and do it.”

Sam looked down at the group gathering. “No offense, but these second string guys weren’t stationed at the HQ for a reason. They aren’t the best. I can back you up.”

“No, she means to kill up there. You take her down and find Nat. Get everyone out here.”

Sam looked at Steve, eyes mostly hidden by his goggles and heads up display. “You sure, man? You aren’t looking so hot.”

Steve could feel the bruises form on his face. “What, this? I can do this all day. Get me down there.”

He did, quickly swooping from the fifth to second story, dropping Steve before soaring up again. Steve managed the fall with most of the grace he usually would have, tucking and rolling, coming up just as a cloud of black smoke appeared from a wall opposite him. Reaper materialized shooting, taking out half a dozen guards before they knew what was happening. As they dropped, wisps of black smoke coiled from them to his form.

Reaper began laughing, the halting laughter of one who might be suffering from some sort of respiratory problems. The guards tried to encircle him, but he only held out his arms and spun while firing.

“Die! Die! Die!” he screamed while laughing.

“Christ,” Steve said, gathering what was left of his resolve and readying himself. He ran at Reaper, throwing his shield. It caught him in the back, bouncing off and up. Steve leapt, kicking off the hood of one of the SVUs and catching the shield, bringing it down onto Reaper’s shoulder.

Reaper screamed, dropping the gun in that hand and falling to a knee. Steve didn’t stop, spinning out of the way of a strike from the other gun, smacking it away with a backhanded slap with the shield.

Steve brought the shield up, bashing Reaper’s death’s-head mask with it. He fell back, the ivory mask cracked in two and falling away. The face of Gabriel Reyes was one that he remembered, if only slightly, when Dugan and Bucky were discussing other additions to the team that would become the Howling Commandos, but not once did they speak, and he didn’t look as he did now.

His face was drawn and pallid, constantly wasting away only to reform a moment later. His eyes, however, were completely dark, and faint wisps of black smoke rose from them. The man smiled, showing his teeth rotten and black. As Steve watched, a line of black blood poured down from a wound made by the shield strike on his forehead, but before the line reached his nose, the wound closed and the blood evaporated into smoke.

“Look, ‘Captain America’. Look upon your legacy.” He vanished into a cloud of smoke, and then blew away to the left, reappearing fifteen feet away, standing upright. He smiled again, and then his hood clouded with smoke, and a new mask appeared. “This is what they made me, when they were trying to make another _you_.”

This time Steve screamed, launching himself at the man, shield first. Reyes vanished into smoke for a moment, Steve passing through him like a cold rain. He solidified behind Steve, pulling more guns and cold-cocking Steve in the back of the head. Pain exploded, and he fell to the ground again.

“So look at what you did. You made the world the way it is. Your existence brought the world to a new era. We are seventy-seven years A.C.A., after Captain America. We needed more super soldiers, so everyone tried to get one. Schmidt and his HYDRA made your precious Sergeant Barnes, your ‘Bucky’, into one, and later when they found out that Howard Stark made another serum, they stole it and created a host of Winter Soldiers. The US government made the Hulk and the Abomination, and Talon made me and mine.” Reaper placed a boot on Steve’s left shoulder, the mere contact with the man causing further pain. He put his whole weight on the joint, dislocating it with a pop. Steve screamed, and Reaper reached down and pulled the shield off him. “All of this pain, terror, and monsters, all to make this. A bleeding sack of shit with a frisbee made of stolen metal.” Steve felt Reaper crouch down low, whisper so quiet he could barely hear it. “You aren’t worth the hoopla. I’m disappointed.”

“Yeah, well…” Steve coughed up blood. “You talk too much.”

Natasha, from the shattered window several stories up, fired on Reaper, blowing through his left shoulder. The shield dropped to the ground, and Reyes swore, black blood spilling from the wound and turning into smoke. He raised his guns to the window but Steve swept his legs from under him, dropping him to the ground.

From the broken window fell a glowing red form, Wanda alight in her power. She reached out again and Reaper fell, washed in that light as well. She walked forward, rage clear in her face, and she clasped her hands. Reyes screamed out as his body disintegrated into black smoke, which condensed into a sphere the size of a soccer ball.

“Natasha, I need the container.”

From the building flew Sam, holding on to Natasha. Landing, she pulled out a clear box with a circular seal. With a series of quick hand movements, Wanda moved the sphere into the box and held it there while Natasha sealed it. 

“Vibranium-laced plexiglass. He isn’t going anywhere,” Natasha said, putting the box down. “Meant to carry radioactive items, but here we are.”

Steve weakly got to all fours, then sat back on his haunches. He could feel that the majority of his ribs were in various levels of disorder, as well as his left arm being dislocated.

“Hey Steve, are you okay?” Sam asked, moving closer.

“Yeah, I’m fine,.” he muttered before passing out.


	10. Chapter 10

Steve came in and out of consciousness. He was on a stretcher, in a Quinjet, the shield placed over him, Wanda and Natasha talking in Romanian. While he didn’t understand a word of it, he could tell that Natasha was trying to calm Wanda down, having heard words in that tone before between the two women. He then fell into darkness again.

He was then lying in a hospital bed, but the room was filled with technologies more advanced than any hospital in the world. Perhaps, except Wakanda, but he knew he wasn’t there; everything was in English. A man sat in the chair next to the bed, his long brown hair covering his face, but no one would make Steve mistake Bucky Barnes for anyone else. It hurt to move at all, so he didn’t, didn’t wake up his closest friend. They both could always use their rest.

The third time he woke, he woke for good, and was alone in the room. The lights were on, but dimmed, as the night outside the window was dark. In the solitude of the room, Steve thought about Reyes and what he said. As insane and immoral as the man was, a kernel of Steve couldn’t completely discredit was Reaper said.

As the organizations and governments of the world tried to repeat the experiment that resulted in his current form of existence, they had done terrible things. Bucky was forced to kill Tony’s parents. Bruce Banner changed his life forever. It’s completely possible that untold numbers of people died in trials for all of these serums. Steve thought back on not just his time in the military itself but the actions of S.H.I.E.L.D., and wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to consider either of them being okay with such things if that meant they got to the goals they wanted, and they were supposed to be the good guys.

At some point, Steve had turned on the television. The first channel it tuned to was one of the twenty-four hour news networks, currently on the scene of an event in Los Angeles, someone superpowered causing a ruckus. Someone had left a tablet by his bed, and it was S.H.I.E.L.D. secured. He looked for information about the event, and found something about a Centipede item. Putting the tablet away, he wondered what the odds were that that, too, was a shot at making a super soldier serum as well.

He sat there, watching the newscasters discuss whether or not there needed to be a super powered registration act and if anyone could be safe if there could be people with ‘abilities’ living right next door. When the idea of super powered reservations or internment camps was floated by the undoubtedly conservative member of the panel, Steve turned it off and tried to get some more sleep. It didn’t come easy.

When he woke, there was the heavy scent of meat and paprika, as well as the muted voices of Natasha and another woman he didn’t know.

“Is she going to stop me?” Wanda’s voice said, to his left.

“No, my love, I told her that if she tried to do so, you’d put a hex on her.”

Wanda laughed, but jumped when Steve chuckled. “You probably would.”

Wanda smacked him on the arm, which elicited a yelp. “I’m sorry, _iubițel_ , you scared me. Can you sit up?”

With their help and the mechanization of the hospital bed, Steve got to a sitting position, to find a tupperware filled with egg noodles and three whole chicken legs swimming in a heavily spiced sauce. Wanda smiled with pride, sucking a bit of the sauce off her thumb.

“Chicken paprikash, just like my _Mamă_ used to make.”

“What, the nurse didn’t approve of Roma home cooking?” Steve said, rubbing his hands together.

“No, she was more on the chicken noodle soup vibe,” Natasha replied, pushing Steve’s legs to the side and sitting on the corner of the bed, dealing out three paper plates and a set of plastic flatware.

Wanda scoffed, rolling her eyes. “What did that thin excuse of a soup ever do for anyone?”

“Hey, my mom made a killer chicken noodle,” Steve retorted.

“She probably got the chicken from somewhere nearby,” Natasha said, helping Wanda serve. “That kinda food rarely exists anymore.”

“Not true. Have you been to Brooklyn lately? There’s two houses near where my old place was that have chicken coops.” Steve laughed.

Surrounded by the women he loved and who loved him, Steve could put most of his discomfort behind him. He could be, at least in that moment, just Steve Rogers, a kid from Brooklyn, eating homemade food with his family.


End file.
